Tell me about your Windows 8 experience

Chances are that either by now, or by the end of the week, some of you reading this post will have bought a new computer with Windows 8. Chances are high that you immediately felt the urge of installing Ubuntu, possibly also to have a shower.

If you did, I would like you to tell me about (Installing Ubuntu.. not about having a shower). I am specially interested if you installed 12.10, and if you had any secure boot issues.

Did all work magically? Did you have to muck around with BIOS settings? Tell me all about it.

9 Responses to Tell me about your Windows 8 experience

I recently installed Windows 8 out of choice and am pleasantly suprised by how fresh and clean it looks. It is running in VirtualBox w/ 4 Gigs of RAM on my Kubuntu 12.10 system. The difficult part was getting VBox to run it full screen but thanks to a quick answer it is running fine in full screen mode. Needed to install some VBox additions.

Anyways once it was full screen I was pleasantly surprised on how clean and fresh it looked. The full screen tiles or start menu works very well, however you have to get used to it. I spent all of last night playing with it and quite enjoyed it.

Well, I use Windows 8 at work (really out of necessity as I’m a .NET developer). I only run Ubuntu in a VM at work, but at home, it’s flipped the other way – Ubuntu as the host and Win8 (and Win7) as VM’s.

For me, Windows 8 isn’t as bad as many on the net are making it out to be. It’s like a lot of the reviews and stuff I see online are like those corny “for only $19.95″ advertisements on TV where they make opening a jar, hanging a picture, cutting up a Tomato or some other every day task look like the _hardest_thing_ever_. I find it really kind of silly.

It’s actually better in many ways than Windows 7 – it boots faster, it runs lighter, it compiles my project faster, It uses less RAM (leaving more room for VisualStudio and SQL Server running in the background). and I don’t mind the UI changes. I don’t use any Metro stuff – I just stay on the desktop, and I actually like the new start ‘screen’ over the old start menu – it’s very similar to Unity – just hit the Win key and start typing for what you are looking for – when it’s found, just hit enter.

I can’t really speak for dual-boot or secure boot, sorry, but just wanted to share my experiences from someone who is both a fan of Ubuntu, Linux and Free Software and *not* a hater of all things Microsoft.

Upgraded a machine from Win7 > Win8 and I was amazed at how light, fast and resposive it is. TBH the UI did not impress me a lot, but it is indeed an interesting concept.

Nowadays I feel that all DEs are kind of sucky and bloated, so it was rather surprising and positive to see that at least Win8 users will feel that they are getting more out of their machines with an upgrade…

Secure Boot wasn’t an issue at all with either Windows 8, or Ubuntu 12.10

Two things, however, were hard: doing an EFI install of Windows 7, and the Ubuntu 12.10 installer being half-baked with GPT.

The Windows 7 case required disabling Secure Boot, enabling a setting called “CSM”, and putting a GPT table on the drive before starting the Windows installer in UEFI mode.

The Ubuntu installer required manual partitioning (it offered only “delete the whole drive” and “manual partitioning”, other options like “use the empty space on the drive for ubuntu” or “resize Windows” were missing), and the manual partitioning in the Ubuntu installer doesn’t support setting up encrypted LVM. So it was a big wobbly pile of unpleasantness, although I did successfully install the OS eventually, dual-booted with Windows 8, with Secure Boot enabled.